2012 Technology Resolutions

It's January, it's 2012, and you know what that means! It's the time of year everyone tries to start fresh and make big changes in their lives to hopefully improve themselves. Does your Upstate New York business have goals and resolutions to work out for 2012?

New Year's resolutions don't resolve themselves, so whether you are trying to quit smoking, become better organized, or lose those pesky love handles, it takes diligence and patience and quite a bit of determination (If you accomplished a New Year's resolution in 2011, be sure to leave a comment to help motivate anyone trying to tackle one this year!). Every year we work together with local businesses to improve their IT, make their computers run better, and implement new technologies to streamline the way they do day-to-day business. We want this year to be no exception, so we've put together a short checklist of some 2012 Technology Resolutions we'd like to see businesses implement in order to safeguard and streamline their operations.

Backup, Backup, Backup

We can't think of any single improvement to a company's IT infrastructure that has more value than a solid backup solution. If your business isn't properly backing up data (and by properly, we mean regularly, in a very comprehensible and testable fashion), this is a great place to begin when looking to improve your business technology. Remember the statistic, 70% of small firms that experience a major loss of data go out of business within a year. Your hard drives in your server (which typically spin at 7,200 RPM) are sensitive pieces of equipment and a single failure can wipe them out. There's an unfortunately high chance that if one of your drives failed and you didn't have a recent backup, you won't be in business in 2013. The cost and time to rebuild data is astronomical. If you are employing a solution for backing up your data, be sure to test it this month (and regularly all year long). Be sure it is actually backing up the data you need and test that the data it is backing up is not corrupted. If you don't have a backup solution or your current solution is lacking, we have an incredible backup solution that takes all of the pain and hassle away from traditional backup solutions and can even assume the role of your server in the event of a hardware malfunction, keeping your business up and running without the risk of data loss.

Organize your Network (And Keep it Organized!)

So you have locations on your network to store files that most of your employees can access. Unless there is someone heavily enforcing the organization of these directories on the network, it's pretty likely they go into a state of disarray pretty quickly. Organizing your folder structure takes a little internal planning - try breaking up files in a way that makes sense and if you have certain folders for certain departments or individuals, they should be organized too. Cleaning these directories up isn't any more difficult than finding the time to do it, but keeping them organized all year long is the trick. Enforce it with your staff and provide a document that states what type of information goes where. A word of the wise? Try to steer clear of setting permissions to your subfolders. If there is information only your Accounting department should access, make an Accounting folder on the root directory.

Audit your Network

Sometimes you can't improve upon things until you figure out your weak points. It's pretty likely there are vulnerabilities or points in your network that can be improved in order to increase security, optimize performance, and help you get a handle on your technology. Running a network audit can help  generate solid goals to improve your efficiency and safeguard your business technology. Contact us today at 607.433.2200 if you are interested in running a full, end-to-end audit on your network. We wish everybody luck in pursuing their goals and resolutions for 2012. Be sure to let us know if you successfully achieved any resolutions in 2011 to help motivate others!